Young players to be scrutinized in CSU’s second major scrimmage

Posted By
Christopher Dempsey
On
August 17, 2012 @ 1:05 pm
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College Sports,Colorado State University,Football,Mountain West Conference |
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FORT COLLINS – If Round One was a scrimmage that took Colorado State coach Jim McElwain by surprise — pleasantly — Round Two certainly won’t. The high-quality precedent set a week ago means the new Rams’ boss is expecting bigger and better things from his team tomorrow in the second major scrimmage of preseason camp.

And the team’s youngest players best be ready. They’re going to be in the spotlight, McElwain said, “now that they’ve had to weeks under their belt, so we can kind of determine which of those guys may be playing this year. And that’s even redshirt freshmen. Young guys that haven’t played, not just true freshmen. I would say in all of their cases, that’s where it’s at.”

As before it will hover around 125 plays. The plan is for 30-50 of them to be played as a regular game would – moving the ball, punting, kickoffs, etc. The rest of the scrimmage will cover more situational stuff, including obscure situations that might pop up in a football game, no matter how rare it may be.

Running back Chris Nwoke (ankle) is expected to participate. He did not practice in this morning’s session but is expected to participate in the lighter drills of two-a-days tonight.

Asked how much improvement he expects to see from last week’s scrimmage to this one, McElwain said “A ton. And really, we’ve got to do a really good job in the communication part in the scrimmage. And cutting down on the unforced errors, the penalties. I think we were like 98th in the country in penalties last year…so what’s that tell you about your focus, your attention to detail? Those are the things, and your accountability to your teammates, those are selfish acts that don’t need to occur.”